I've been using eaccelerator to cache PHP opcode and improve my web server performance for a while. The main reason I didn't pick other solution back then was the ease of deployment; To make upgrade and maintenance easy, I usually only use Fedora pre-packaged software. Recently, I bumped into article on APC, and found it might be a better solution. Fortunately, Fedora now included it as standard. So, I decided to give it a try.

In order to benchmark the web server performance, I wrote a simple PHP script to poll a website with CURL. It might not be the most accurate, but all I need is a baseline to measure the average load time.

After some testing, here's result:
no acceleration: ~0.550 sec
eaccelerator 32Mb cache: ~0.475 sec
eaccelerator 64Mb cache: ~0.455 sec
APC 32Mb cache: ~0.417 sec
APC 64Mb cache: ~0.413 sec

APC is also come with a control panel:



From the performance point of view, any opcode cache helps server performance as expected. APC, from the result, has a edge over eaccelerator. In addition, APC has a more informative control panel. APC also a part of PECL, which is semi-standard to PHP.

Therefore, I switched to APC.

BTW, I also use my benchmark script on Google.... its load time is a wicked 0.112 sec. I guess I still have a long way to go.

After the last transplant, the server is still unstable and crash so often that it becomes almost unusable.

So, I replaced it once again w/ a Abit NF-M2P w/ a AMD Athlon64 X2 4800+ on AM2 socket.

At the same time, I take the time to re-install Fefora 9 on the server since F6 is no longer supported.

To further utilize all the CPU power, I install boinc and run SETI@home . It also to see if the server is stable.

After weeks of testing, I am happy to announce that now I have a stable server running finally.

Continue to setup F9 after initial install.

- gthumb photo import is broken... see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=182039
- firefox3 beta is able to start at the preferred desktop(s) under GNOME. But pages were swapped to different windows, so I still need to manually swap them to the desired desktop.
- firefox3 beta and pidgin hangs from time to time, but upgrade to firefox 3 actual fixed the problem. (yeah!)
- SE GC83 GPRS/EDGE modem not working w/ NetworkManager see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=444911

The title of this post was used to be "My FreeNAS #2", which continue from where we left off. But not long after I setup my home-brew NAS server, I saw a Promise NS4300N at Fry's for $350..... damn, why it has not come out earlier?

Fast forward to present, I just can't passed off a neat toy:



I plugged in 4 Western Digital WD4000AAKS SATA HDD, and setup a RAID-5 with 1.2TB total capacity.

One of the major disappointment I have with my FreeNAS server is its poor performance (given it has a very powerful CPU). I just can't get more than 4MB/sec out of it over a Gb switch.

So I did some benchmarking to see how well the NS4300N behaves. The test is done by copying to/from a 1.4GB avi movie file.

The first test is to transfer the file using my T60 running Fedora 9 over Wifi using SMB (aka Windows file-sharing), just to see how bad it is. The transfer goes through a 802.11G link of ~20 feet away from D-link DI-624 wireless router, then pass over a 100Mb ethernet link to Netgear GS608, which send the data down a 1Gb ethernet link to the NS4300N. The test showing a 0.7MB/sec write to NAS, and 1.8MB/sec to read. What this really mean in real-life? A choppy avi movie playing on my T60.....

In the second test, I copy the file back and fore from Fedora 9 over the 1Gb ethernet on the GS608. The write speed is at 1.5MB/sec and reading at 7.9MB/sec. A good improvement.

Then I repeat the test on a Aopen miniPC running Windows XP SP3, 1.2Ghz P4 I used as HTPC (and which I should write about sometimes in the future). The result is amazing at 10MB/sec write to and 16MB/sec read from. It's actually in-line with SmallNetBuilder.

You can tell I am happy about NS4300N's performance. There was complains that the drive tray is too flimsy, but I am ok with that. The only con I see is the NAS fan is way too noisy.

Further food for thoughts:
- I am wondering how come the performance on Fedora 9/T60 is so bad.
- I am also wondering how jumbo frame going to make a different. I have setup on NS4300N to do 4KB jumbo frame, but I thought the other end also need some setup?
- Another test I should run is to see how NFS and FTP perform vs SMB.
- I recently bought a pair of ZyXel PLA-401 HomeplugAV adaptor, wondering how thing behave over it.

Stay tuned for part 3.

Finally have some times to upgrade my Thinkpad T60 to Fedora 9. As usual, there are improvements on various front.



- startup/shutdown is much faster than F8
- my T60 seems cooler when idle
- firefox 3.0b5 is included, but have not try it enough to see if it's better than v2.0.x
- manually installed Adobe acroread
- tried out swfdec/gnash but it does not work with youtube and etc, so install Adobe flash right the way
- setup livna to install extra Gstreamer plugins for mp3 and other formats
- pulse audio sound preferences playback some how need to re-configure to auto-detect so mp3 playback work in rythumbox
- firewall setup changes is needed to allow SMB access to work
- bluetooth h/w on T60 still not working out of the box, I raised a bug report in the past, but the dev team has not fixed it. Sending file via bluetooth now work, but I have not find out how to receive file
- Compiz desktop effect is still not working out of the box
- skype 2.0 rpm failed to install because of mismtach libraries
- packagekit is simple, but too simple. One cannot batch install a set of application
- Qemu VM infrastructure is not much of improved (or maybe I did not do it right?)
- Miro is still unable to play download mp4 out of the box... it's a lost cause?

Finally got Fedora9 preview installed on admun2. Since this is a preview, I am not going to spend too much time on things. In fact, I have to make a lot of work around to hack it to work.

Saw many Fedora people are having fun profiling their shell command history... so tried it myself.

It's not very exciting, doesn't it?

[root@admun2 ~]# history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -nr | head
226 ls
198 cd
73 vi
68 dmesg
64 exit
47 df
33 less
31 ps
26 fg
23 mv